Ex-AIG boss Hank Greenberg is ginning up an Uncle Sam act in a bid to restructure the taxpayer-funded firm, whose shares surged yesterday on an optimistic government report. Photo: Bloomberg News

Hank Greenberg’s triumphant return to his beloved American International Group is nearly complete — making him $588 million richer than he was in the spring.

Shares soared 21 percent after Washington lawmakers said yesterday they were ready to use a roadmap devised by Greenberg to help AIG recover from near collapse.

Greenberg, who built the company over four decades into the world’s largest insurer, had been frozen out of AIG in a boardroom coup four years ago.

But he has regained his stature by convincing lawmakers and regulators in recent weeks that his 10-point recovery plan could help return AIG to profitability and clear up its $182.5 billion in government-bailout debt.

Even AIG’s own publicity machine that trashed Greenberg for years offered welcoming arms yesterday for his rescue plan, which AIG said “would assist the company in restoring value to shareholders and repaying the taxpayer.”

Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-Brooklyn), whose House oversight panel is monitoring the bailout, said he’d ask the US Treasury and Federal Reserve to give AIG more breathing room to repay its rescue package.

Instead of using the government’s original five-year term to repay taxpayers, Towns is seeking up to 20 years for the payback, which is what Greenberg proposed in his 10-point blueprint. Towns also will review slashing interest and restructuring debt.

AIG jumped $8.49 to $48.40, even as the US Government Accountability Office said in a report that “AIG’s ability to restructure its business and repay the government is unclear at this time.”

All summer, Greenberg met privately with officials in Washington to sell his recovery plan and prevent a fire-sale breakup of the company. The plan would also lower AIG’s debt through guarantees, new equity, lower interest rates and claw back some of $50 billion that went out the back door as counter-party payments to Wall Street banks last September.